Software Sucks
Wednesday, December 19, 2007 2:51:15 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)
Next month my family and I are moving to a new place. So today I made a list of people & companies that I needed to contact to update my address. I really only expected to take about an hour to update my address at 15 different places.
It turns out that this simple task of changing my address is taking me close to an entire work day. Why? Because "Software sucks!"
It's literally unbelievable how many hoops a customer service representative has to jump through in order to make this simple change. I just spent 20:04 minutes speaking with a customer service rep from SAIT to change my address. During that 20+ minutes I heard him say things like:
"It's not allowing me to save."
"It's saying you have a bunch of primary phone numbers."
"It's saying it's locked."
"I have to get a hold of a technical person."
What? I'm sure the first thing most people are thinking is that this person didn't know how to use a computer. Even if that was the case, which I don't think it was, why would he be made to use one then!? Would software actually be the correct solution to help him be more productive? I felt like this guy knew what was going on and was working towards my best interest.
I had the same issue while speaking with a representative from SHAW. I spent 11:05 minutes on the phone with this gentleman. He told me that because the address wasn't in the system he couldn't change my address. He had to send an email to a "technical" person so that they could add the address to the system, so that he could change my address. Does this sound crazy to you? Why is there this dependence on the "technical" people to get things done. IMHO, because "technical" people never gathered the necessary feedback while they were building the system. Software should empower it's users, not inhibit them!
The gentleman at SAIT noticed that there were a few mistakes in regards to my account so he took it upon himself to fix those errors. But in the process of doing so, he was stopped by several "technical" hurdles. Which I assume is the reason why previous customer service rep's didn't take action earlier. Because they saw "the technical hurdles" and knew that it would just slow them down.
As I was on the phone with this person I asked him questions like...
"Did anyone ask you for your feedback when they were building this software?".
His response ... "No! Why would they do that!?"
My response, "because you're the one using the software... maybe!???".
He proceeded to tell me about software and how it's built. He said they get these different consultants to come in and build different parts of a system. He said it was like getting 2 different groups to build each side of a bridge. And when they try to put the bridge together, it doesn't fit so they duct tape it together to make it "work".
He is so right, why is this the norm for software development? Why is it that we think it's ok to have to rely on our "technical" people to solve problems that shouldn't be there in the first place. If this gentleman's feedback was asked for during the construction of the software, most of these hurdles probably would have been addressed then. Maybe then... he could actually be the productive employee that he wants to be, and I can get a long with my day!
Who thought changing and address could be so hard!
